“Don’t do this to me.” His own injuries aren’t as bad as hers. She’s leaving him again, forever this time. Shock fatality the brutally simple, brutally accurate death. Her chest rises and falls, her breathing getting shallower all the time. I need you to help me stop the bleeding.” He grasps Dodger’s shoulder, feeling the solidity of her, the vital, concrete reality of her, and shakes as gently as he can. No one-not even him-walks the improbable road alone. If this is where it ends for one of them, let this be where it ends for all of them. Erin can’t hold them off forever, no matter how hard she tries.ĭimly, he realizes he doesn’t want her to hold them off forever. The bullets are chewing the concrete away, and the people who followed them down the improbable road will be inside soon. Firecrackers never did this sort of damage. The gunfire from outside is louder and less dramatic than he expected, like the sound of someone setting off firecrackers inside a tin can. Anyone who tries to say he doesn’t is lying. They never got to the Impossible City, and now they never will. That’s how they wound up here, on the other side of the garden wall, at the end of the improbable road, at the end of everything.
They twist and bite and require too much attention. Numbers are simple, obedient things, as long as you understand the rules they live by. He knows the words that apply to this situation-exsanguination, hypovolemia, hemorrhage-but they don’t reassure him the way the numbers reassure her. The math would be true, and that’s all she’s ever asked from the world. She’d think she was being comforting, even if the number she came up with meant “I’m leaving you.” Even if it meant “there is no coming back from this.” She’d calculate the surface area and volume of the liquid as easily as taking a breath, and she’d turn it into a concrete number, something accurate to the quarter ounce. If Dodger were awake, she’d happily tell him exactly how much of her blood is on the floor. And when she stops breathing, so does he. She doesn’t, no pun intended, have it in her. Each breath is a clear struggle, but she keeps fighting for the next one. Her chest rises and falls in tiny hitches, barely visible to the eye. This blood belongs inside the body where it began, and yet here it is, and here he is, and everything is going so wrong.ĭodger isn’t dead yet, despite the blood, despite everything. It seems impossible, ridiculous, a profligate waste of something that should be precious and rare-and most importantly, contained.
Roger didn’t know there was this much blood in the human body. TIMELINE: FIVE MINUTES TOO LATE, THIRTY SECONDS FROM THE END OF THE WORLD.
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